Some time ago, I caught the tail end of a 60 Minutes segment
on the Magdelene laundries of Ireland, where from the early 19th century until 1996 some
30,000 females, considered "fallen women" were held prisoner by Catholic nuns
and put to penal servitude, mostly for life.

It was something I'd never heard of before.

When I stumbled across the movie, "The Magdelene Sisters"
on Netflix, I added it to my queue and Saturday night I watched it.

A review described it as "a drama almost unrelieved in its portrayal of a mad theocracy, sexual repression
and rage." That's putting it mildly. This is definitely not a feel-good
movie.

The story centers around four girls
who are sent off to this "convent" because they are considered fallen women.
One of them was raped by a cousin at a family wedding; one was in an orphanage and
was caught flirting with boys and branded as a woman of loose morals; the other two had
children out of wedlock.

The denigration and abuse these women
suffered at the hands of the sadistic nuns in the film is unspeakable. According to
one woman who survived the experience,

Plenty of people will think the events in the film have been
exaggerated to make it more dramatic. But I tell you, the reality of those places was a
thousand times worse. Theres a scene in which a girl is crying in the dormitory and
another goes over to her bed to comfort her. That could never have happened. You
werent allowed any private conversation.

Again, in the film the girls get glimpses of the outside world and even ordinary
people who dont live in the laundries. In reality, we were totally incarcerated. You
could see nothing except sky.

I was so affected by the movie that
today I went and did some on-line investigation into the Magdelene laundries and what I
read so shocked me that I cannot believe that I was a member of this church for so long.
I cannot believe that this situation went on, with the church's knowledge and
encouragement, until 1996.

The new Pope is considering banning
all gay men, even celibate gay men, from the priesthood as a way of ending the abuse of
children. This assumes that straight men are more able to control their sexual urges
than gay men and that no females have been abused by priests (or, as I am beginning to get
the feeling, females are unimportant so their abuse is irrelevant and not worth
mentioning).

I read several articles about the
Magdelene laundries after seeing the film. This lengthy article is
particularly eye-opening. Some of the comments...

"The women are
beaten, degraded and suffer sexual abuse. All this that they might do penance for their
sins!"

"The Magdalene laundries were merely the tip of the iceberg of
the crimes perpetrated against women and children by the Catholic church and the Irish
clericalist state. As many as 300,000 children were locked in industrial
schools where they were denied an education and forced to do manual work for no
payslave labour with the profits of their labour going to the church.

"From the 1940s to 1970s, a horrific medical procedure was
carried out on pregnant women who would otherwise have had a caesarean birth. They were
forcibly, and often without their knowledge or consent, subjected to an operation known as
symphysiotomy, where the cartilage junction of the pubic bone was sawed through in order
that the pelvis would open like a hinge during childbirth. As a consequence
many women were crippled and condemned to a life of incredible pain and suffering.
Expressing the Catholic-dominated medical professions rationale for this inhuman
butchery, Dr. Alex Spain argued that if caesarean births were carried out, The
results will be contraception, the mutilating operation of sterilisation, and marital
difficulty (Irish Examiner, 17 April 2001). Women were simply seen as
vessels for making babies."

Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by
Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful
to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first
place. I had a letter from a woman in America in her forties, who said that when she was a
child of about seven, brought up a Catholic, two things happened to her: one was that she
was sexually abused by her parish priest. The second thing was that a great friend of hers
at school died, and she had nightmares because she thought her friend was going to hell
because she wasnt Catholic. For her there was no question that the greatest child
abuse of those two was the abuse of being taught about hell. Being fondled by the priest
was negligible in comparison.

[end of quotes]

The last paragraph above there rang bells with me. I remember
my concern about hell because my mother, at the time an unbaptized person, was, they told
me, condemned to hell while my father, alcoholic/rageaholic that he was, had a straight
shot into heaven by virtue of his baptism.

I could go on and on and on about how angry I am, a little after the
fact, since the laundries are now closed, but at the deception that
innocent Catholics are subjected to every single day, with being taught one thing while
behind the scenes these horrible, horrible things are going on that the Church hierarchy
continues to sweep under the rug -- and, who knows? Perhaps even encourage.